“Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know”?

Biography: William Lamb

William Lamb was born the second son of the Viscount and Viscountess
Melbourne, although his father realized that he had not in reality “sired” William. Indeed,
of the Viscount’s six children, only the first, Peniston, sprang
from the loins of his father. Having fulfilled her duty as
a wife to provide her husband with a son and heir (Peniston), Lady
Melbourne used her personal charms to further her family's interests
by having love affairs with powerful men. William’s father
was actually the Earl of Egremont, and he apparently took pride in
his son, whose picture he hung at Petworth.

After William and Caroline fell in love, it appeared they
had no future, for William was a second son and would have to make
his way in the world, while Caroline was an aristocrat whose mother
hoped she might even marry the Prince of Wales. However,
Peniston died of tuberculosis, and William returned to ask for
Lady Caroline’s hand. They were married June 3rd, 1805. From
that moment until Caroline finally passed away in January 1828,
the couple lived in constant expectation that William’s father
would die, leaving the Melbourne estate to his second son. But
Lord Melbourne outlived his daughter-in-law by six months. It
appears the elder man never completely got over the death of his
first-born. He treated William with grudging respect and
kept the couple on a relatively small allowance throughout his
life.

William is usually portrayed as a long-suffering husband. Undoubtedly
he was. However, he and Caroline formed such a solid bond
that he refused to give her up, even when he might easily have
done so. It appears that despite her numerous flings, he
remained faithful to Caroline until the very last months of her
life. By the standards of his class, this represents a truly unbelievable
level of fidelity to one’s spouse, as William’s biographer
Leslie Mitchell admits in some puzzlement. Once we acknowledge
that their bond was abnormally tight, we can begin to make sense
out of the fact that William refused for so long to be separated
from her, and encouraged her writing career even when his friends
and relatives were howling her down, standing ready (quite literally)
with a doctor’s declaration of insanity and a straitjacket
to cart her away. Even after he finally agreed to a
legal separation in 1825, he couldn’t really go through with
it, and he permitted Caroline to return to her beloved country
home, Brocket Hall, where she lived out the remainder of her painful
(but much calmer) days.

When Caroline died, William told Lady Brandon (with whom he
had recently started an affair), that he felt “a sort of
impossibility of believing that I shall never see her countenance
or hear her voice again, and a sort of sense of desolation, solitude
and carelessness about everything, when I forced myself to remember
that she was really gone.”

William later survived not one but two prosecutions for “Criminal
Conversation” (i.e., adultery) with women who found his reserved
manner and taste for whipping difficult to fathom. He became
the first Prime Minister under Queen Victoria and died in 1848.